North Plains Mall opened in October 1985 on North Prince Street in Clovis, New Mexico, as a single-level enclosed mall with 41 shops. Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, and Bealls were its anchors.
J.C. Penney had moved out from Main Street for the opening, and Sears left its downtown store for a new west wing in 1989. Around 2000, Dillard's moved into the space Wal-Mart had left.
Sears closed in 2017, and Dillard's and Stage, which had taken over from Bealls, closed in 2020. Big R now trades in the Sears wing, and the Dillard's space holds four stores.
Zales and maurices are the only shops besides JCPenney that remain from opening day. In mid-2026 the mall was 72 percent occupied, with 74,000 square feet vacant, and was on the market.
The mall planned for Prince and Manana
The ceremonial start of construction was set for 10 a.m. on January 10, 1985, at the corner of Prince Street and Manana Boulevard.
Price Development of Salt Lake City had bought the 33-acre tract there the year before, and its announcement that January described a 322,000-square-foot regional center, the company's ninth enclosed mall in the western United States.
Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, and Bealls were to anchor it, with 40 more shops alongside.
What opened nine months later was smaller.
North Plains Mall, still an operating enclosed mall, began trading at 2809 N. Prince Street on October 16, 1985, with about 250,000 square feet on a single level and 41 shops, the three anchors included.
Wal-Mart took the south end, and Bealls came to Clovis for the first time. J.C. Penney left its store on Main Street to anchor the new building.
The smaller stores on opening day included Zales, Gordon's Jewelers, and maurices, along with Radio Shack, Kay Bee Toys, and a Hallmark Card Shop, while Orange Julius was one of the first food tenants.
Sears arrives, Wal-Mart moves north
In 1989 a second downtown department store made the same move.
Sears gave up its store at Seventh and Main for a wing built onto the west end of the mall, which made it the fourth anchor and brought the building to roughly 303,000 square feet.
By 1997 the roster ran to Bealls, JCPenney, Wal-Mart, and Sears, with a Red Lobster and 35 other merchants.
Wal-Mart's next Clovis store opened farther up the same road.
On September 16, 1998, the company opened its 500th Supercenter at 3728 N. Prince Street, north of the mall.
The mall store, open since October 1985, employed about 280 people; the Supercenter was expected to employ about 565.
Once Wal-Mart moved out, the south end of North Plains sat empty, and later big-box stores on North Prince also went in north of the mall.
Around 2000, Dillard's moved into the old Wal-Mart box, and the south end held a department store again.
Sears, Dillard's, and Stage close
Sears announced in September 2017 that it would close its Clovis store, and by the end of that year the west wing was empty.
The store had employed between 50 and 99 people.
Two more anchors closed in 2020.
Dillard's, the south anchor for about two decades, had shut its store under the state's pandemic orders, and in May the company announced that it would close permanently and notified 50 Clovis employees.
In early June a resolution was before the city commission asking Dillard's to reconsider and raising the possibility of working with the state on incentives.
The 62,000-square-foot store was closed for good by August 1.
Stage, the banner that had replaced Bealls in the east anchor, entered liquidation that same May, and its liquidation ended on August 30, 2020.
By that date three of the mall's four anchor boxes were empty, at the west, south, and east ends.
JCPenney had left the Clovis store off its first list of 2020 bankruptcy closings, and it was now the only department store open at North Plains.
Big R in the Sears box
The mall's next owner arrived by way of the empty Sears space.
A Colorado developer first made an offer on the Sears portion alone, to land a lease with Big R. He then bought the other portions of the mall, and by fall 2022 he owned all of it.
In March 2023, Big R was moving into the old Sears store at the west end while the owner brought plans for the old Dillard's and Stage spaces to the city.
Big R took 42,000 square feet of the former anchor, with a 25,000-square-foot outdoor display yard planned alongside.
It held a soft opening on October 21, 2023, and a grand opening on November 4.
With Big R trading, the west wing was back in retail use, roughly six years after Sears had closed it.
Four stores in the Dillard's box
The south end changed more.
At the March 2023 city economic-development discussion, the owner showed a concept that split the old Dillard's space among Marshalls, Michaels, and Burlington.
By June 2024, new west-facing storefronts were going into the old Dillard's wall while Marshalls and Ulta Beauty built out their stores.
Neither Michaels nor Burlington took space there.
The mall's developer, North Plains Mall Management LLC, applied for construction-cost reimbursements under the city's retail Local Economic Development Act program.
On November 7, 2024, the city approved agreements for Marshalls and Ulta unanimously.
Marshalls had cost $4.0 million to build, and the city agreed to pay back as much as $2.0 million of it from its share of gross-receipts tax over no more than 10 years.
Marshalls opened on November 21, 2024. Ulta Beauty held a soft opening on February 2, 2025, and an official opening on February 14.
Ross started construction on February 17 that year and had its grand opening on July 19.
Shoe Dept. moved out of a store of about 5,000 square feet in the mall into a Shoe Dept. Encore of about 12,000 square feet at the south end, and it was trading there by February 2026, the month the city commission unanimously approved a third agreement for it.
The anchor that Wal-Mart had opened and Dillard's had closed was now four separate stores.
One anchor box left to fill
Only JCPenney, Zales, and maurices are left from the businesses that opened the mall in 1985.
The concourse around them now holds tenants with no counterpart on the 1985 roster: a Clovis Police Department substation and recruiting offices for the Air Force, Army, and Marine Corps.
The Clovis Area Train Society uses mall space for its model trains.
The east end, where Bealls had opened and Stage had liquidated, had found no permanent tenant by fall 2026.
Spirit Halloween took it for the 2026 season, from August 1 through November 2, with an outside entrance and another from Center Court.
In 1989, with the Sears wing open, North Plains had four anchors.
In mid-2026 the whole mall was on the market at $18.5 million. It was 72 percent occupied, with 74,000 square feet vacant.
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